The present invention relates to a method for quality control of products from fish, cattle, swine and poultry, for instance for controlling a process for treating or handling such products.
The fish processing industry pays great attention to the task of removing the bones from the fish. The removal of bones, e.g. in connection with filleting, is carried out in machines with a subsequent manual trimming for removing any remaining bones which may be observed with the eye or felt by the fingers. Such manual detecting methods are very slow and unreliable, which means that fish products often escape the control with remaining bones undetected. Many fish products which have been boned are delivered in the frozen state in large packages to wholesalers or the canning industry who will also carry out the above-described manual control on a random sample basis for a small part of the package, to assess the presence of any remaining bones in the package. If it is found in this control that the contents of bone exceed a predetermined value, the entire package is discarded, which means a considerable economic loss to the supplier.
In the preparation of meat products by cutting animals and in the making of mixed meat products, such as sausage, brawn, minced meat, pate etc., both as perishable and canned foods, one has lately placed still higher demands on the declaration of the contents of the products. Analyses in this respect have hitherto been performed substantially on the basis of the chemical constituents of the product, such as fat, protein, ash, water etc., and it has been very time-consuming and difficult, not to say impossible, quantitatively to define the composition of the product on the basis of the animal tissue components which are of great importance for the organoleptic quality, such as tenderness, or the nutritional quality, such as digestibility. It is also evident that the economic values in pure meat are considerably higher than in other animal components, such as fat, connective tissue, cartilage, and that there is thus an economic incitement toward being able accurately to determine the composition of the meat products, so that the raw products can be better utilised in the processing factories. With an accurate method for detecting the most important animal components it would be possible on a large scale to control automatic trimming apparatuses for optimal use of the valuable meat in the animal parts which are difficult to cut manually in a cost-effective way.
One object of the invention is to provide a quick and reliable method for detecting bones in fish products.
Another object of the invention is to provide a quick and reliable method for detecting animal components, such as bone, cartilage, connective tissue, fat and meat (muscles) in meat products, including poultry products, which detection should preferably also allow quantitative determination of at least one of the aforementioned components.
With these objects in mind, the main purpose of the invention is to provide a method for the abovementioned detections which permits a more rapid and at least equally accurate quality control of fish and meat products as compared with prior art methods, for instance for controlling processes for treating and handling fish and meat products.